“Start Quote

He absolutely deserves the Nobel Prize, he created a
cognitive revolution”

End QuoteDr Colin LeverFormer student of John O'Keefe

'Cognitive revolution'

Dr Colin Lever, from the University of Durham, worked in
Prof O'Keefe's laboratory for ten years and has already dreamt on two occasions
that his former mentor had won the award.

He told the BBC: "He absolutely deserves the Nobel Prize, he created a
cognitive revolution, his research was really forward thinking in suggesting
animals create representations of the external world inside their brains."

"Place cells help us map our way around the world, but in humans at least
they form part of the spatiotemporal scaffold in our brains that supports our
autobiographical memory.

"The world was not ready for his original report of place cells in 1971,
people didn't believe that 'place' was what best characterised these cells, so
there was no great fanfare at that time.

"But his work on hippocampal spatial mapping created the background for
discovering grid cells and with grid cells, the world was prepared and we all
thought wow this is big news."